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November 18, 2013

Unexpected behavior in ferroelectric materials explored by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory supports a new approach to information storage and processing known as memcomputing. (hi-res image)

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 18, 2013—Unexpected behavior in ferroelectric materials explored by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory supports a new approach to information storage and processing.

Ferroelectric materials are known for their ability to spontaneously switch polarization when an electric field is applied. Using a scanning probe microscope, the ORNL-led team took advantage of this property to draw areas of switched polarization called domains on the surface of a ferroelectric material. To the researchers’ surprise, when written in dense arrays, the domains began forming complex and unpredictable patterns on the material’s surface.

“When we reduced the distance between domains, we started to see things that should have been completely impossible,” said ORNL’s Anton Ievlev, the first author on the paper published in Nature Physics. “All of a sudden, when we tried to draw a domain, it wouldn’t form, or it would form in an alternating pattern like a checkerboard. At first glance, it didn’t make any sense. We thought that when a domain forms, it forms. It shouldn’t be dependent on surrounding domains.”

After studying patterns of domain formation under varying conditions, the researchers realized the complex behavior could be explained through chaos theory. One domain would suppress the creation of a second domain nearby but facilitate the formation of one farther away -- a precondition of chaotic behavior, says ORNL’s Sergei Kalinin, who led the study.

“Chaotic behavior is generally realized in time, not in space,” he said. ”An example is a dripping faucet: sometimes the droplets fall in a regular pattern, sometimes not, but it is a time-dependent process. To see chaotic behavior realized in space, as in our experiment, is highly unusual.”

Collaborator Yuriy Pershin of the University of South Carolina explains that the team’s system possesses key characteristics needed for memcomputing, an emergent computing paradigm in which information storage and processing occur on the same physical platform.

“Memcomputing is basically how the human brain operates: Neurons and their connections--synapses--can store and process information in the same location,” Pershin said. “This experiment with ferroelectric domains demonstrates the possibility of memcomputing.”

Encoding information in the domain radius could allow researchers to create logic operations on a surface of ferroelectric material, thereby combining the locations of information storage and processing.

The researchers note that although the system in principle has a universal computing ability, much more work is required to design a commercially attractive all-electronic computing device based on the domain interaction effect.

“These studies also make us rethink the role of surface and electrochemical phenomena in ferroelectric materials, since the domain interactions are directly traced to the behavior of surface screening charges liberated during electrochemical reaction coupled to the switching process,” Kalinin said.

The study is published as “Intermittency, quasiperiodicity, and chaos during scanning probe microscopy tip-induced ferroelectric domain switching,” and is available online. Coauthors are ORNL’s Stephen Jesse, Evgheni Strelcov, Sergei Kalinin and Amit Kumar; the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Anna Morozovska and Eugene Eliseev; the University of South Carolina’s Yuriy Pershin; and Ural Federal University’s Vladimir Shur. Ievlev, formerly of Ural Federal University, has joined ORNL as a postdoctoral fellow.

Part of this research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is sponsored at ORNL by the Scientific User Facilities Division in DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences. CNMS is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers supported by the DOE Office of Science, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE's Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit http://science.energy.gov/bes/suf/user-facilities/nanoscale-science-research-centers/.

ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy's Office of Science. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov.

The role of carbon in the development of life and as the structural backbone of all organisms is universally accepted and an essential part of evolution. However, the molecular basis is largely unknown and the interactions of carbon with nitrogen and oxygen in space are enigmatic.

In 1985, the previously unknown form of carbon, coined fullerene, was discovered. We hypothesize that by virtue of the unique properties of fullerene, this hollow, ultra-robust, large, purely carbon molecule was the earliest progenitor of life. It acted as a stable universal biologic template on which small molecules spontaneously assembled and then formed, by further assembly, a surface mantle (here termed rosasome) of larger molecules.

September 10, 2010

Georgia Tech Regents professor Ronald Arkin (left) and research engineer Alan Wagner look on as the black robot deceives the red robot into thinking it is hiding down the left corridor. (Click image for high-resolution version. Credit: Gary Meek)

A robot deceives an enemy soldier by creating a false trail and hiding so that it will not be caught. While this sounds like a scene from one of the Terminator movies, it’s actually the scenario of an experiment conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology as part of what is believed to be the first detailed examination of robot deception.

We have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and we have designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered,” said Ronald Arkin, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing.

The results of robot experiments and theoretical and cognitive deception modeling were published online on September 3 in the International Journal of Social Robotics. Because the researchers explored the phenomenon of robot deception from a general perspective, the study’s results apply to robot-robot and human-robot interactions. This research was funded by the Office of Naval Research.

In the future, robots capable of deception may be valuable for several different areas, including military and search and rescue operations. A search and rescue robot may need to deceive in order to calm or receive cooperation from a panicking victim. Robots on the battlefield with the power of deception will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe.

“Most social robots will probably rarely use deception, but it’s still an important tool in the robot’s interactive arsenal because robots that recognize the need for deception have advantages in terms of outcome compared to robots that do not recognize the need for deception,” said the study’s co-author, Alan Wagner, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

For this study, the researchers focused on the actions, beliefs and communications of a robot attempting to hide from another robot to develop programs that successfully produced deceptive behavior. Their first step was to teach the deceiving robot how to recognize a situation that warranted the use of deception. Wagner and Arkin used interdependence theory and game theory to develop algorithms that tested the value of deception in a specific situation. A situation had to satisfy two key conditions to warrant deception — there must be conflict between the deceiving robot and the seeker, and the deceiver must benefit from the deception.

Once a situation was deemed to warrant deception, the robot carried out a deceptive act by providing a false communication to benefit itself. The technique developed by the Georgia Tech researchers based a robot’s deceptive action selection on its understanding of the individual robot it was attempting to deceive.

To test their algorithms, the researchers ran 20 hide-and-seek experiments with two autonomous robots. Colored markers were lined up along three potential pathways to locations where the robot could hide. The hider robot randomly selected a hiding location from the three location choices and moved toward that location, knocking down colored markers along the way. Once it reached a point past the markers, the robot changed course and hid in one of the other two locations. The presence or absence of standing markers indicated the hider’s location to the seeker robot.

“The hider’s set of false communications was defined by selecting a pattern of knocked over markers that indicated a false hiding position in an attempt to say, for example, that it was going to the right and then actually go to the left,” explained Wagner.

The hider robots were able to deceive the seeker robots in 75 percent of the trials, with the failed experiments resulting from the hiding robot’s inability to knock over the correct markers to produce the desired deceptive communication.

While there may be advantages to creating robots with the capacity for deception, there are also ethical implications that need to be considered to ensure that these creations are consistent with the overall expectations and well-being of society, according to the researchers.

“We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects,” explained Arkin. “We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should constrain the development of these systems.”

May 21, 2010

Scientist Craig Ventner and his team have inserted an entire synthetic genome into bacterial cells, that took over the operation of the cell from the natural genome. This follows previous successes in inserting snipets in DNA from species to species and transplanting the entire natural genome from one bacterial species into another.

Significance:

This could be rated as one of top 5 discoveries for 2010.

Proof of concept that bacterila genomes can be swapped by synthetic versions of entire genomes. Leads to the next stage-interting unique bio-apps in to bacterial, viruses, fungi or algae-.like new apps (applications) for your smart i-phone. Creating semi artificail bacterial or algae that convert C02 in butyl alcohols or higher chain gasoline or gasohol. (ETA 2015-2020)

Will we be seeing basement biologists hacking and tinkering with life? Not very soon. A Science Commentary this week reports:

"The synthetic genome created by Venter's team is almost identicalto that of a natural bacterium. It was achieved at great expense,an estimated $40 million, and effort, 20 people working formore than a decade. Despite this success, creating heavily customizedgenomes, such as ones that make fuels or pharmaceuticals, andgetting them to "boot" up the same way in a cell is not yeta reality. "There are great challenges ahead before geneticengineers can mix, match, and fully design an organism's genomefrom scratch," notes Paul Keim, a molecular geneticist at NorthernArizonaUniversity in Flagstaff."

Background:

Negatively stained transmission electron micrographs of dividing M. mycoides JCVI-syn1. Electron micrographs were provided by Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman of the NationalCenter for Microscopy and Imaging Research at the University of California at San Diego.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome. They now hope to use this method to probe the basic machinery of life and to engineer bacteria specially designed to solve environmental or energy problems.

The study will be published online by the journal Science, at the Science Express website, on Thursday, 20 May.

The research team, led by Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute, has already chemically synthesized a bacterial genome and it has transplanted the genome of one bacterium to another. Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a "synthetic cell," although only its genome is synthetic.

"This is the first synthetic cell that's been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer," said Venter.

"This becomes a very powerful tool for trying to design what we want biology to do. We have a wide range of applications [in mind]," he said.

For example, the researchers are planning to design algae that can capture carbon dioxide and make new hydrocarbons that could go into refineries. They are also working on ways to speed up vaccine production. Making new chemicals or food ingredients and cleaning up water are other possible benefits, according to Venter.

In the Science study, the researchers synthesized the genome of the bacterium M. mycoides and added DNA sequences that "watermark" the genome to distinguish it from a natural one.

Because current machines can only assemble relatively short strings of DNA letters at a time, the researchers inserted the shorter sequences into yeast, whose DNA-repair enzymes linked the strings together. They then transferred the medium-sized strings into E. coli and back into yeast. After three rounds of assembly, the researchers had produced a genome over a million base pairs long.

The scientists then transplanted the synthetic M. mycoides genome into another type of bacteria, Mycoplasm capricolum. The new genome "booted up" the recipient cells. Although fourteen genes were deleted or disrupted in the transplant bacteria, they still looked like normal M. mycoides bacteria and produced only M. mycoides proteins, the authors report.

"This is an important step we think, both scientifically and philosophically. It's certainly changed my views of the definitions of life and how life works," Venter said.

Acknowledging the ethical discussion about synthetic biology research, Venter explained that his team asked for a bioethical review in the late 1990s and has participated in variety of discussions on the topic.

"I think this is the first incidence in science where the extensive bioethical review took place before the experiments were done. It's part of an ongoing process that we've been driving, trying to make sure that the science proceeds in an ethical fashion, that we're being thoughtful about what we do and looking forward to the implications to the future," he said.

April 21, 2009

The BBC reports that a simulated brain experiment is getting closer to real thought. A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains. The "Blue Brain" has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory. Scaling the simulation to the human brain is only a matter of money, says the project's head. The work was presented this week at the European Future Technologies meeting in Prague

February 05, 2009

The next issue of New Scientist will feature an article about smart robots that evolve and grow in real time or unnatural selection..more disruptive technology on the way. We will see how much of this can be turned into commercial value, instead of just being an acedmic curiosity

According to New Scientist:

"Living creatures took millions of years to evolve from amphibians to four-legged mammals - with larger, more complex brains to match. Now an evolving robot has performed a similar trick in hours, thanks to a software "brain" that automatically grows in size and complexity as its physical body develops.

Existing robots cannot usually cope with physical changes - the addition of a sensor or new type of limb, say - without a complete redesign of their control software, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

So artificial intelligence engineer Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created a robot that adapts to such changes by mimicking biological evolution. "If we want to make really complex humanoid robots with ever more sensors and more complex behaviours, it is critical that they are able to grow in complexity over time - just like biological creatures did," he says."

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

January 07, 2008

Christmas and New Year's is a time when many people think about birth or rebirth and some think deeper--even more philosophically about how life first started on earth.

The complexity of life has always bothered me. Helical DNA molecules are a fairly complex structure and I always wondered if there could have been a proto-genesis stage to life…ie what where the steps before the creation of DNA and RNA on Earth?

We are now getting some strands of evidence (pun intended) that suggests what came before DNA and RNA. One explanation is the primordial soup theory. According to Wikipedia, the primordial sea, or primordial ocean, is a term applied collectively to the oceans of the earth at a very early time in its history, either the time before or during the development of multi-cellular life forms (i.e., during the Precambrian), or alternatively before the development of the first land-based life forms (i.e. during the early Paleozoic). The term primordial ooze (or primordial or prebiotic soup), refers to a particular set of models of the origin of life.

Could some other atom or molecule have been used as a template for the creation of life on earth, prior to the short-strand DNA formation stage?

Carbon is one of the most abundant atoms on earth. Most people will recognize two forms of basic carbon; charcoal or graphite (the lead in your pencil)and diamonds. The third form of carbon (discovered in the 1980’s) is C60 or Fullerenes or Buckyballs, named after Buckminster Fuller, the designer of the geodesic dome at Expo 67 which resembles a 60 point soccer ball.Fullerene (C60, C70, etc.) was the third carbon allotrope discovered in 1985 (by H.W. Kroto, R.E. Smally, R.F. Curl; Nobel Prize in 1996), and since then, a great deal of attention has been focused on its physical-chemical and unique bio-medical properties. Fullerenes have been found in nature (in molasses - a waste byproduct of heating sugar cane), in candle soot and in impact craters of meteorites in Sudbury Ontario( formed both on impact and of extraterrestrial origins).

Fullerenes are also formed by lightening discharges, so imagine earth's atmosphere--a natural lightening factory producing fullerenes through millions of years.

So, could C60 Fullerenes have been the templates for very basic amino acids to form the first strands of life (DNA) in earth’s pre-mordial soup, millions of years ago?

This plausible hypothesis was proposed by Prof. Grigoriy Andrievsky in Sudak Crimea at the 7Th International Conference called Cosmos and the Biosphere, in the fall of 2007 in a paper entitled “Water Structures ordered [in a] specific manner as universal regulators of biological processes; what hydrated fullerenes-the symbiosis of cure carbon and water-have told [us]”.Andrievsky G.V. ISMA NAS Ukraine, STC 'Institute for Single Crystals', Kharkiv, Ukraine. Andrievsky points out the similarity between spherical fractal clusters of hydrated fullerenes (HyFn) (C60 and surrounding water clusters) and some of the most significant biological structures.Fullerenes have been found to mimic several biologically important structures such as clathrine cages, viral structures, and other structural (spatially) similar biological supra-(or sub)-molecular structures. He also suggests that the universalism of HyFn biological activity as the confirmation of hypothesis that C60 - H2O systems might be the matrix for primary biological matter (substance) formation (such as RNA or DNA).

He writes:

“The wide range of HyFn positive biological activity can be determined by the quite eligible hypothesis that fullerenes and fullerene-like structures, conjoint with water molecules, could be the first natural matrices for the initial synthesis of pristine bio-molecules on earth. As a consequence, HyFn should not be foreign for living organisms and, thus, they should be capable of protecting and stabilizing the biological structures formed in nature and which exist in a hydrated state."

This was confirmed this week in a paper published in Chemical Physical Letters called Fullerene-Amino Acid Interactions. A Theoretical Study.by Aned de Leon, Abraham F.Jalbout and Vladimr A. Basiuk. In it, they explored the ability of the C60 fullerenes to interact with amino acids at the theoretical level. The calculations suggest that the most favorable interactions of the fullerene is with arginine, leucine, and tryptophan which is related to the backbone structure of the corresponding amino acids.

October 10, 2007

The New York Times reports today that IBM and Linden Lab (the creator of Second Life,)and a consortium including Cisco, Google, Sony, Intel, Multiverse, Microsoft, Motorola, Philips and othersare announcing plans at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo at San Jose, Calif., to develop open standards that will allow avatars to roam from one virtual community to another.

The goal is let a person create a single digital alter-ego that can travel to many virtual worlds, keeping the same name, look and even digital currency, that would create a truly interoperable 3D internet.

In a related story, CNET News.Com, reported on October 9, 2007 that Virtual-worlds platform developer Multiverse Network is set to announce a partnership that will allow anyone (DIY) to create a new online interactive 3D environment with just about any model from Google's online repository of 3D models, its 3D Warehouse, as well as terrain from Google Earth.

Another project is SceneCaster, a new technology unveiled at last week's Demo conference that allows anyone to make 3D "scenes" incorporating models from the 3D Warehouse that can then be attached to blogs or Facebook pages or even to Flickr.

Both SceneCaster and Multiverse's Architectural Wonders projects will be shown at the same Virtual Worlds conference, in

October 06, 2007

Not since the race to put the first satellite in orbit ( The Soviets won that one 50 years ago exactly in Oct 1957 with Sputnik --the brain child of Ukrainian scientist Serhii Korol'ov ) and the race to put a man on the moon, won by NASA , has there been so much excitement in the scientific community. For those of you who haven't been following this story, we seem to be on the brink of the creation of the first artificial life form on earth…. humans playing God from down on earth with synthetic biology or what I like to call Genesis 2.0

The top down approach (strip & test method ) is being used by Dr Craig Venter's US team which started working with one of the simplest cellular life forms - the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, which causes urinary tract infections. By individually stripping away each of its 482 genes and observing the effect on the organism Venter’s team calculated that a core group of only 381 genes are vital for life ie. for a cell to function and reproduce. Earlier this year, they applied to patent the discovery- essentiallythe basic bacteria chassis on/in which to create life. Venter was quoted on the weekend saying: "It's not like baking a cake, mixing all the ingredients and putting it in the oven, and hey presto, there's new life," he says. "We're not creating life, we are creating new life forms from existing ones." They hope to use this chassis or platform to create (on the positve side) artificial bacteria to produce sustainable energy (hydrogen or gasoline or convert hydrogen and CO2 into methane), attack climate change ( scrub out CO2) or as a carrier for new drugs against cancer and other diseases. or in a "darker world" scenrio-bioweapons of mass distruction.

A similar designer, engineering approach was used by scientist at LS9 to engineer e. coli bacteria to make gasoline (see here)

Using a reverse tactic, Dr Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University in Italy, and Pier Luigi Luisi are aiming to design and build a artificial live form from the bottom up. This bottom-up approach has the possibility of creating living systems from entirely non-living materials from the laboratory

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be "a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before".

The Guardian can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code."

[...]

Pat Mooney, director of a Canadian bioethics organization, ETC group, said the move was an enormous challenge to society to debate the risks involved. "Governments, and society in general, is way behind the ball. This is a wake-up call - what does it mean to create new life forms in a test-tube?"